It has been asserted that a large percentage of a typical person's day is spent communicating with others through various mechanisms including oral and written media. Further, there is often a tradeoff between rich, oral communication media and less rich, written communication media. While oral media enable negotiation, clarification, explanation and exchange of subjective views, written media enable the exchange of large amounts of accurate, objective or numeric data.
This dichotomous relationship between oral and written communication similarly exists within the electronic realm. Simple textual email messages, although easy to author, typically do not allow rich, expressive communication as may sometimes be required. On the other hand, tools for creating richer, more expressive messages, such as multimedia presentation software, are too complex and time consuming for casual or day-to-day use. Furthermore, multimedia presentation software typically is not designed to be used as an communication tool. Multimedia “documents” produced using this software tend to present information to an audience, rather than allow user interaction and self-guided learning.
Therefore, what is needed is a method for creating a simple and effective multimedia authoring tool that overcomes the limitations found within the prior art.